Tepco announced Wednesday that, according to the Times, “There is the possibility that criticality, a sustained nuclear chain reaction, had occurred ‘temporarily’ and ‘locally’ in the No. 2 reactor.”

During it’s testing, Tepco has detected xenon-133 and -135, “Products of uranium or plutonium fission.”

The half life of xenon-135 is about 9 hours, therefore, “Criticality is very likely to have occurred just before the gases were analyzed,” reports the Times.

“Clearly the reactor has not yet been stabilized,” and, according to the Times, “The fact that Tepco cannot deny the possibility of criticality irrespective of its scale is a grave situation.”

And the article notes, “Conditions are similar in the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 reactors.”

Now is the time to get “serious” writes The Times:

“Tepco should make serious efforts to accurately grasp the conditions of nuclear fuel inside the reactors.”

“Tepco and the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency should take a serious view of the fact that radioactive xenon pointing to criticality was detected from the No. 2 reactor. What happened in it can happen in the Nos. 1 and 3 reactors.”

“we know the Japanese are not the Master of open talking and writing!”

i am inpressed that the japan times is starting to focus on the problem at hand….when apportioning blame though, like kazahkstan and like belarus and like japan there needs to be quite alot of blame aimed at the IAEA and its slave the WHO….

SURELY THESE JOURNALISTS COULD SEE THE CONNECTION?

IAEA ……international nuclear cabal that supports nuclear with lies and coverup…releasing spurious press releases for the media machine…full of top “specialists” in the field, equiped for mass contamination events, who hold all the real information about effects of mass releaese….. nuclear share holders are lucky to have this organisation backing them up…

any article that proports blame should be looking at the IAEA who always says that everything is alright, but who disapears into the night when something is proven to be wrong!! no critism of the IAEA is allowed, but it is the central powerhouse behind nuclear…. the latest nuke report posted yesterday shows us the format for these reports…vague! incomplete! biased!…the IAEA is calling the shots in japan…it always has…
the high normal releases from these plants is allowed by the IAEA in all countries with nuclear…only independant testing shows us the level of these “releases” and recent events at mercoule france show us plainly the level of coverup…

no not just tepco in fact hardly tepco at all… they are only the arm of the beast…its emplyees will be blamed if things get out of the IAEAS hands and nuclear censorship/buisness will go on

i repeat again

SURELY THESE JOURNALISTS COULD SEE THE CONNECTION?

anyway im just going through a bit of a suspicious media analysis phase, so sorry media if im a bit hard on you!! (not)

It was controlled by government censors during WW2, as were almost all media in Japan, but that hasn’t been true since. The Japan Times is independently owned and published and has no connection to the government whatsoever at present time. This is hardly the first article to be quoted here on EneNews, and while they report plenty of official press conference stuff (like any major media outlet), they have also certainly printed their share of nuclear-sceptic articles.

But when have facts ever gotten in the way of expressing opinions based on ZERO here on EneNews…

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Japan’s government approved Friday support funds for Tokyo Electric Power Co. JP:9501 -0.66% TKECF +3.45% , also known as Tepco, with the move coinciding with the release of updated figures showing a massive net loss for Tepco for the fiscal year ending in March. Tepco will receive about 900 billion yen ($11.5 billion) in funds via the Nuclear Damage Liability Facilitation Fund to help compensate victims of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Tepco said Friday it expects a net loss of ¥576.3 billion for the fiscal year. It also said it plans to reduce staff numbers through a hiring freze, to cut pension benefits and to maintain a 20% salary reduction as part of cost-cutting moves. The measures will help lower operating costs by ¥237.4 billion in the 2013 fiscal year, Tepco said….

“Tepco injected 10 tons of a solution containing 480 kg of boric acid into the No. 2 reactor shortly before 3 a.m. Wednesday to restrain nuclear fission. This inversely shows that it has not been injecting a boric acid solution into the reactors in continuously cooling them by circulating water. Its laxness should be criticized. It wasn’t till after 7 a.m. Wednesday that NISA reported the criticality incident to Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. NISA clearly lacked the ability to make a correct judgment in this matter.”http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/ed20111104a1.html

Has anyone considered the effect of Boron on water purification efforts? If the efforts to reprocess water to use for coolant in the reactors suffers many more setbacks, ‘guessing’ about criticality might not be a problem.

Ongoing fissioning is bad, as it releases all kinds of nasties into the air, but I think the REAL worst-case scenario is if it explodes. In that case, it may be potent enough to take the other reactors with it, or, perhaps even worse, the force may be enough to topple the extremely fragile spent-fuel pool #4, which Arnie Gundersen has suggested would be one of the most disastrous developments imaginable–and one that they would be even less capable of getting under any kind of control. It’s filled with an enormous amount of plutonian nastiness (I realize “plutonian” is not a word, but if plutonium is going to get spewed in even more massive quantities all over everything on the planet, then we really ought to develop an adjectival form of the word to describe things).

So does anybody know what is the likelihood of this “temporarily sustained” fission leading to an explosion?

Dear Sick: Isn’t it 670,000+ spent fuel rods in the CSFP at Fukushima Dai Ichi? Maybe I have the wrong information. Either way, I believe there have been at least four fires at the CSFP since April. I hope you are having a good day. Radioactive rain fell here today in Northern CA. Had a headache most of the day, which just, in my case, could have been the passage of a cold front. Many other people with throat and headache problems, which are not uncommon in this part of the country when we finally do start having rain, from the usual microbiological pathogen causes (common colds). I hope it’s not due to high ambient radionuclide contamination of the misty, humid air today.

Thank you. I don’t know, have forgotten, where I heard that there were ~600,000 fuel rods in the FDI common spent fuel pool. I’ll look into it. I’ve got the headache today; but am glad yours is better. I thought mine was from low blood sugar (not from coffee withdrawal) or a cold (in my case); but could be cold front related for me. It wasn’t from low blood sugar. I tend to get a headache or feel run-down when storm fronts come through sometimes. I look forward to hearing about the geese behavior. I’m taking an ecology class and love to hear about all animal behaviors obvserved by people.

The air here in S. Oregon is filled with smoke from burning leaves, a bummer in itself, but with the thoughts of all the particuluate contamination they’ve accumulated since March, well, the smell is now scary……

So it IS a word after all! Well, now it has an additional meaning “of, relating to, or covered with plutonium”–though the hellish/infernal meaning definitely also applies to everything that relates to the stuff.

The men who named plutonium knew what they were doing when they chose that name–sadly, they did NOT know what they were doing when they CREATED it.

Let’s just hope “plutonian” doesn’t become a word that we need to use very often.

Probably, for a while, who knows how long, a year or several years, the contamination from Fukushima emissions may not reach the southern hemisphere in the same significant concentrations as we have here in CA being directly on the other side of the ocean, in the path of prevailing winds and currents, particularly in the winter, from Tohoku. There seems to be more of a spirit of keeping billionaire greed and literally poisonous crimes in check, in Argentina, at least. I’m not certain about Chile, which strikes me as a bit more fascist and less of the people than Argentina. Perhaps the drier areas of southern Argentina, Patagonia, would be safest. Maybe the same is true for drier parts of Australia. However, Australia is difficult to immigrate compared to Argentina and they don’t tolerate a speck of drug use, whatsoever by foreigners, particularly at their airports and they will blood test for the least provocation in Australia. In any case, flight won’t work forever. We will all be forced to eventually join the inevitable and necessary movement to destroy the billionaire, corporate, military NO-transparency control over the status quo. Confrontation and non-pacificist ACTION is required by all who know better. There is no escape increasingly.

I have ever desired to live in South America, but if it would buy us a few more years I would consider it…again, only if some kind of major new development occcurs with the reactors or the spent fuel pool. It’s cheaper there, right? So maybe my money would go farther there, at least.

I agree that destroying the billionaire, corporate, etc. etc…I’m all for that. It gets a little discouraging though, to hear that George Soros might be making money off of Occupy Wall Street..what do you do when people with money and power are even manipulating the revolution?

I believe in non-pacifist action, but sometimes wonder if a V For Vendetta scenario would be more effective…

Dear Westcoast: However unpalatable the solution, you must destroy the billionaires by any means necessary. There is no other way around it. They are psychotic individuals who believe their psychosis is sanity.

>So does anybody know what is the likelihood of this “temporarily sustained” fission leading to an explosion?

That is a very good question since people have been talking about this possibility for several months now. The basic problem is that it’s all informed guess-work as to where the fuel is currently located and in what state… it’s clear it’s not on the path to “cold shutdown” in 2 months, as TEPCO insists…

the chernobyl scientists were afraid of such an explosion till they realised the sand had mixed with the corium and rendered it waterproof (temporarily unfortunately)
we have no data that the us overflights, the chinese expedition in the china seas to look for contamination, the usgs mobs results on marine life, and no westwern scientific group is attending to the developing situation at chernobyl…in fact the opposite (nearly, thanks to enenews and the handful of sister websites covering this disaster)

so, no, the information is held in secret!! the rest of us have to pick at the bones and in that we are useful..
just my tuppence worth there mate!!

Of course fissioning is occurring and plutonium is a by-product, which is one of the big reasons why these fissioning coriums continue to become MORE radioactive for 250,000 years. “partial” fissioning is double speak or misrepresentation of the reality.

Would there be interest if I did a special hour discussion of issues that people are having with Fukushima and some of the misconceptions that I have been seeing such as plutonium being the largest concern. (look up curium) Also, although the rods are called spent they are not burnt up. Actually, the rods are called spent when they are filled with enough byproducts that control cannot be guaranteed. The radiation occurs in many forms creating many byproducts not only in the fuel but also in the containment vessel or anything else that the radiation hits.

I could probably ask for someone to host a Ustream talk if anyone would like to submit some questions. I may not be able to answer all, but I may be able to explain the material parts. My expertise is in the methods and material not operation of a nuclear plant. We did not use our stuff for making power.

I watched a NOVA special on the fabric of the universe tonight. Last night I read the comments made at Ex-SKF about what is going on with the coriums.

It seems clear to me after watching and reading that physicists do not understand fully what is going on at Fukushima because this is, in fact, unprecedented (Chernobyl was “contained” in days) and every time physicists have an opportunity to study matter in new environments (e.g., particle accelerators) they learn new and surprising things about how matter and energy behave.

Worse, in addition to not understanding what surprises await us, it seems from the comments at Ex-SKF and here that even the most technologically inclined among us (not me) really know how to contain this MONSTER on earth.

We have truly opened Pandora’s box.

I think the Japanese government and Tepco are together truly frightened now.

Majia you are exactly correct. We truly are experiencing this as one now. Pandora’s Box is open and things are about to start flying around the room.

Let’s hope something surprising and helpful comes from all of this.

I expect our Liar-n-thief Obama will plaster a concerned frown onto his face and pretend to care. Perhaps he will look at his own two daughters and think carefully before saying something ridiculous or trite.

It’s gonna take a suicide mission of large magnitude, to even attempt to stop this. I have been a tradesman for 31 years, and have found that engineers can only get us in proximity to our goal. The people in the field are the final piece of the solution. Why I am saying this, I have no idea, but I would be willing to go in there if I had considerable input on how it went down. We have to go underneath in grand fashion. Anything else is not going to work. The people of this planet are so involved in their own drama, that they don’t see the beauty around them. But this is part of our evolution. I see potential in this misguided society and want to do whatever I can to give it another chance. Its not over till its over. I have dealt with many superiors that had too much ego invested to reach quality outcomes. I would jump in, but there better be some people that are objective or the deal is off. Oh yeah, and I would want to live the way I wanted when the job was finished. , Not that extravagant, 50 ft. of boat, a Jag. And two chicks that are open minded. My kid gets carte blanche too. Let me know, I can be found through here. There’s not much time, let’s get our shit together here.

Thanks for volunteering, but no one knows what the heck is going on. I think there is actually no solution possible to this disaster. If a rod in a functioning nuclear reactor so much as gets stuck, one has a major problem that takes a year to fix. This is, well, a lot worse. Where are the cores? On the floor, in the ground, spread over the building?

Every country that plays with nuclear tech will have to fund the greatest containment structure the world has ever seen. It will bankrupt everyone but at least there will be a future. It will be granite, aluminum, titanium, and for sealing layers probably gold gaskets. Everything has to last for thousands of years – so no steel or concrete. Nothing can rust. For earthquakes, it will have to be squat, and the ground around it prepared with the right materials to stop oscillations. This will be our legacy to the far future.

don’t forget during decay, not only will payload change chemistry and form, but the radiation will also eventually change form and chemistry of containment vessels. That stuff must be maintained for hundreds of millenia.

Radiation even results in something resembling chemically active helium for brief periods. Not easy to contain over a long time

Well, I think that it is safe to assume that we need to get under this stuff, so I would be mobilizing a team to start tunneling or drilling or whatever. While that is being coordinated, some math guys can determine how deep we need to go to be certain that we get underneath this stuff. Meantime, another team is determining the best way to address the molten crap, be it a large scale cooling system or a pit made of cement filled with whatever, boric acid, beer, piss, whatever. Remembering that time is all important here. when it is determined what type of defense is to be used, then someone should be getting the necessary equipment and supplies together and have it at the ready. At this point we would need to impress upon our personell that a sloppy job would be pointless, and that we need them to be fully present. This would be a good start.

LIVE FEEDS

Receive Occasional Enenews Newsletters

sending...

Name

E-mail

SUPPORT ENENews

ENENews receives no funding from anyone or anything, except 1) People who donate via the button below, and 2) Google, who pays for the two ad spots. Thanks to all who have donated or are planning on doing so, it's nice to know people appreciate your work.